Good afternoon to all. Mr. President-elect of the Republic of Chile, José Antonio Kast, and the entourage accompanying him, his future cabinet, members of the government cabinet of El Salvador, friends of the press, ladies and gentlemen. Well, first a greeting to all the people who are watching us through our live broadcast, through the media, or who will watch later. Today we received in El Salvador the president-elect of the Republic of Chile. It is a pleasure to have him here in our country. We follow his trajectory very closely and we are very happy that we feel Chile has taken the right path by electing him.
I want to start by saying something that, although it is evident, is often overlooked, and that is that what we can offer is little compared to what a country like Chile can offer. Chile is a country that has a lead of many years, probably decades, on almost all issues. We would like to be like Chile in many things, and it is a country that has a lead of many years in development, in education, in health. Well, even in small things like throwing trash on the street and that type of thing, issues of civics. We have a lot to learn from Chile and from the Chileans. We do not pretend to come and say how things should be done when we are a much smaller country and we are many years behind Chile.
However, we were the most dangerous country in the world. The serious security problem that Chile has now was, I don't know exactly how many times, but more than 10 times worse. It was the most dangerous country in the world. And we did, I say that everything comes from the grace of God, but for those who don't believe in God, we can show the steps and the things we did, and it worked. And we went from being, and this is I think indisputable, we went from being the most dangerous country in the world to the safest in the entire continent, and God willing, we are going to be the safest in the world. And Chile now has an insecurity problem.
So, if we can contribute our experience, what we have done here, knowing that there are many differences in legal issues, issues of the size of the problem you have, it doesn't compare to the size of the problem we had. We know there are differences in institutional frameworks, differences in laws, a different Constitution. But setting aside all the differences, I think we can, the least we can do is contribute and show what we have done here, President, so that you take what you consider applies and in the form and size that you consider applies.
However, there is another thing I would like to say, and that is that when the problem starts, there are usually many voices that say, 'No, no, don't worry, everything is fine, nothing is going to happen or nothing is happening, sorry.' And they start to minimize the problem. It happened to us when the gang problem started in the 90s. I remember I was a child, a young man, but I remember people saying, 'No, they're just young people who are making a mess.' They weren't murderous gangs yet, they were, let's say, community groups that formed, they came, it was an imported culture from the United States, but it wasn't a homicide problem yet. When they started killing, people started saying, 'When they ask for money, you have to give it to them because if not, they'll kill you.' But if you give it to them, no, they won't kill you.
And little by little, later when it started to become a big homicide problem, they said, 'No, it's only among them. It's fights between gangs. No, no. The population that isn't a gang member and doesn't mess with them doesn't have problems.' And that's how the cancer grew, growing, growing, growing until we became the most insecure country in the world. And there, Salvadorans of all types were being killed indiscriminately.
I imagine that 25 years ago when this problem started, or 27, 28 years ago when this problem started, it could have been resolved with much milder medicine than the one we had to use two and a half decades later. But at that time they didn't do it. There was much debate about whether that was what should be done. There was a lot of corruption, there was a lot of infiltration of criminal groups in the government. There was a lot of tolerance for criminals that became intolerance for the honest population. There was the dictatorship of criminals, and a government of crime was installed in this country, and that is widely documented. Crime was governing. There were territories, mostly, 80% of the country was controlled by criminals. You couldn't trade without their permission, you couldn't move from one side to another without their permission. All businesses had to pay a tax that was an extortion called 'rent'. They decided, they had courts, they decided who was guilty or not of something. They decided who had to die or who could be forgiven. They applied rules, curfews, entry hours, exit hours. In this community you can enter until 7 or 8. In this community you can't leave at a certain time. What type of business could be there? Even with street vendors who weren't even formal locals, they would come, they had them cataloged, they charged them taxes, they told them, 'You 10 move from here to there and here come another 10.' They organized the streets. They weren't just criminals, they were the government and had established the dictatorship of crime.
Of course, when the country lived for decades in a dictatorship of crime that was also the bloodiest in the world, no one mentioned anything. Now that we have liberated it, then the debate begins, right? But the reality is that there were 6 million Salvadorans imprisoned, plus another 3 million who had to flee the country, some because of the civil war and others because of the gang war. And now we have 6 million free Salvadorans and 3 million Salvadorans who, for the most part, and this is what surveys done in the United States by large organizations say, for the most part want to return. So we went from having 6 million prisoners and 3 million exiles to having 6 million people who are free and whose human rights are respected, and 3 million exiles who can now return home.
I say this not only to tell you about El Salvador, but as a warning of what can happen in a country that lets its criminal phenomena keep growing and growing and growing under the auspices of supposed human rights, which are not really human rights, because if they were, they would worry about people in general, but they are only the rights of criminals. They say that he who pardons the wolf sacrifices the sheep. It is a decision that must be made whether to pardon the wolf or not, but the consequences cannot be ignored. If one pardons the wolf, one is sacrificing the sheep.
President, count on us as your friends. We are here to serve you. I know you have visited several countries to also take other experiences. And it seems right to me, you have visited several countries, you have met with many leaders, you are taking the best of each thing, and in the end we pray that your government will be the best Chile has ever had. Thank you very much, God bless you.
Good afternoon. First of all, thank the media, thank also, as President Bukele did, the people who follow us online, because they are spokespeople for good news, and that good news is recovering the quality of life. I thank you very much, President, you and your government team, for opening the doors of your nation to us. We were able to learn a little over a year ago about some of the public policies you were implementing, which have been an example for other nations, and today we have reiterated, we have reviewed once more the results that have been obtained over time. I was listening to you give an account of what your nation was, and I thought with anguish that it is part of what is happening to us today. When one intervenes at the right time, the consequences that the humblest people pay are grave, the people who do not have the possibility of defending themselves, because those who have resources will always have the alternative of leaving the country, of having more protection measures, but it is the humblest people, the people who live in the most remote sectors, often far from the urban center, who begin to suffer from terrorism, from crime, from organized crime.
And Chile, which is going in a direction contrary to progress in security issues, even in economic growth issues, has been losing hope, and when one loses hope, one becomes demotivated and everything starts to go wrong. And there, the important thing is to find a north, a lighthouse that illuminates people in a certain way. We have suffered, as I was telling you, great fires in our nation that seemed to have no solution, but a family decided to allocate resources and hire a super tanker, a plane with a lot of water, water carrying capacity, and it was used to put out fires, fires that seemed to have no solution. The plane didn't put out that many fires, but it returned the hope that it was possible to get out of that crisis. And you as a nation, a smaller nation, as you said, today are the hope of many nations that see how organized crime advances and it seems to have no control. And yes, you have made tough but necessary decisions.
We have seen prison systems in different countries, and the prison system that many media outlets report on from El Salvador is only the CECOT, but they don't talk about the rehabilitation of people who have committed a single crime, because the people who are serving sentences in the CECOT, one has to think that each one of those there murdered at least 10 people. Therefore, if there are 20,000 people or 18,000 people in the CECOT, multiply it by 10. And that is more loss of human life sometimes than in a civil war. And it's tough, yes, but it's necessary. We don't necessarily have to do the same because the conditions are different. But it is also important to highlight what we saw last night, that there were people in the zero idleness system that has a reward for each of those people who broke the law, which is that for every day of work they have two days less of sentence. And you told us, this is a prison system that has a hard part, but also has a rehabilitation part, and that prisons for common crimes have rehabilitation incorporated, and we see how those people who have broken the law collaborate in the making of the items that young people will receive for their education, that contribute to cleaning the city.
I want to congratulate you on the cleanliness of the city and the country, because today I was able to fly over a large part of the city and it's not just the main avenue that is clean, but the entire city is beginning to emerge in a different way, because again they say, if I work, my work will benefit my family, not crime. My effort will bear fruit, my effort in studies, my effort in work. Therefore, I want to thank you once again for being a beacon of hope in recovering security. In terms of security, our minister has a tremendous challenge in the Ministry of Security. Our minister of foreign relations also has a tremendous challenge of reinserting Chile positively into the world. That is why I thank you for your company on this marathon trip where we were able to have meetings with the president of Bolivia, with whom we have reached the same agreement to overcome poverty, to overcome the insecurity of our nations, with the president of Brazil, with whom we have had political differences, but we see that overcoming those political differences we are going to work together for our homelands, for our country, with the president of Panama, with the president of the Dominican Republic, with each of them, and now we close this trip with the visit we have been able to make here, where we learn a lot.
We are proud to say that our Minister of Defense visited the main naval school in Chile. We also want to extend an invitation for you to return to that main school. We are very sorry for the loss of your chief of police, who also visited our country. We want to generate links of collaboration in what we can contribute in terms of mining technology, in education, in agricultural issues, but we also want to ask for your collaboration in improving our prison system, in better understanding your criminal justice system, not necessarily, as you said, doing the same, but according to our reality, to always perfect the aim of improving the quality of life of our compatriots. So I thank you very much for the opportunity to have visited your nation once again, to extend the invitation to our country when the conditions are met and you deem it appropriate, to generate links of collaboration because we are brother nations, and to tell you that you are a beacon in a world agitated by crime, by organized crime, and that we now have a lot to learn from you. Thank you very much.
